Following on from the success of the inaugural 2017 symposium, we invite abstracts for this year’s steampunk conference at the Asylum Festival. To celebrate a decade of Europe’s largest steampunk festival, we will be focussing on steampunk on the global scale.

Since the creation of the Asylum Festival, steampunk has grown in popularity, expanding from its initial literary forms and subcultural communities to infiltrate and inform many areas of popular culture and mass media. As it has been adopted and adapted around the world, so it has started to shift away from its Anglocentric, (neo-)Victorian roots. This has led to the rise of vibrant and diverse steampunk cultures and communities across the globe. This conference will explore the nature of what has become a worldwide phenomenon. It will reflect on the factors that have encouraged steampunk’s global development, and examine the ways in which steampunk has been appropriated and inflected by countries and cultures across the planet.

Each August Lincoln (UK) becomes the temporary capital of European steampunk culture. This is your opportunity to join us in a celebration of steampunk, to share papers and exchange ideas, and to participate in lively cross-disciplinary discussion.

Papers might consider (but are certainly not limited to) some of the following topics:

Multicultural steampunk – steampunk fictions and cultures around the world.